Stern Exhibit on Loan From Historic Arkansas Museum to Premier on University of Arkansas Campus

Fayetteville, AR - The artwork of the late Little Rock physician-turned-artist, Dr. Howard S. Stern, will be on exhibit at the University House on the University of Arkansas campus through April 2005. The exhibit is on loan from the Historic Arkansas Museum, a museum of the Department of Arkansas Heritage, in Little Rock.

Stern's daughter, Ellen Stern, will make a presentation about her personal experiences and the life and work of her father as an artist, photographer, gunsmith and physician at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 29 at University House at 1002 W. Maple St. on the UA campus followed by a reception. The public is invited.

This premier exhibit, titled "Curve as Encounter," includes watercolors, drawings, and photography representing more than seven decades of work by this Arkansas artist. This exhibit is the first in a series of collections to be presented by the Historic Arkansas Museum at the University House.

Swannee Bennett, deputy director and chief curator of the Historic Arkansas Museum, said: "We are pleased to bring the Howard S. Stern exhibit to Northwest Arkansas to show on the University of Arkansas campus. It is part of our continuing commitment to showcase Arkansas history and culture by featuring the works of Arkansans for the enjoyment of the entire community."

The exhibit will be shown until April 30, 2005. University House is open from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Biographical Infomation

Howard S. Stern was born in 1910 in North Carolina and moved to Little Rock in 1912. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., for a year before transferring to Little Rock Junior College where he earned a degree. He was a 1935 graduate of the University of Arkansas School of Medical Sciences. He served as an Army reserve and selective service medical officer during World War II and worked as a surgeon in Little Rock from 1936 to 1948, before he moved his practice to Pine Bluff, where he worked until his retirement in 1984.

Beginning in the 1920s and continuing into the 1990s, Stern mastered many of the mysteries and methods of the visual and healing arts. A former Arkansas Arts Center director, Townsend Wolfe, remarked that Stern's creative and intellectual life path was one fraught with curves, each of which he saw as "an encounter, as a necessary route to take in his quest for life." Dr. Stern was blessed with a broad vision for life, one in which his creative spirit flourished within a variety of media and professions.

Dr. Stern, ever the avid painter and photographer joined with several other like-minded physicians, and two talented, professionally trained Arkansas artists - Howard Bragg and Adrian Brewer - to form the tongue-and-cheek-titled painting club called the Ars Medica Tobacco Road Club during the mid- to late 1930s. Dr. Stern related that the Ars portion of the group name referred to the professional artists members, while the medica referred to the physicians. The term Tobacco Road, which they took from the title of the gritty Southern novel by Erskine Caldwell, referred to a shanty town located along the Arkansas River, which the group would often frequent for artistic inspiration.

This information was collected from a biography about Dr. Stern co-edited by Ellen Stern and George West "Howard Stern: A Lifetime Looking," published in 1994 by August House Publisher.